Lines formed in his face, and in those lines were the travail of the North, the bite of the frost, all that he had achieved and suffered

Jack London -- Burning Daylight

Is all our travail turn’d to this effect?

William Shakespeare -- King Henry VI, Part 1

The man, the story goes, has resolved to "swim across the county," and after some travail of walking in on his neighbors and scaling property walls and crossing busy parkways, he finally makes it back to his own home, which, to his desperate confusion, he finds locked up and deserted.

Chang-rae Lee -- A Gesture Life

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I considered myself an agnostic, emancipated enough from the shackles of belief and also brave enough to resist calling on any such questionable gaseous vertebrate as the Deity, even in times of travail and suffering.

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

We listened politely, and I tried not to catch Jamie’s eye as the Duke squeaked out the story of his travails.

Diana Gabaldon -- Outlander

She thanks God for giving her strength to get through the day’s travails.

Sonia Nazario -- Enrique’s Journey

The travails of John Mallon Waterman, however, attracted less attention.

Jon Krakauer -- Into the Wild

Though I couldn’t claim to read the mind of a horse, I had the strange notion that this one was enjoying my travails.

Nicholas Sparks -- Dear John

Who heapeth up so many new travails and penalties as I saw?

Dante Alighieri -- Dante’s Inferno

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They couldn’t understand that the sort of meal they took for granted, a thirty-minute production in the land of General Electric, translated here to a lifetime of travail.

Barbara Kingsolver -- The Poisonwood Bible

Six or seven times larger than even the most luxurious of office spaces, the knight’s cabinet de travail resembled an ungainly hybrid of science laboratory, archival library, and indoor flea market.

Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code

And all this time, in travail, sobbing, gaining on the current, we rowed into the strait-Skylla to port and on our starboard beam Kharybdis, dire gorge of the salt sea tide.

Homer -- The Odyssey

The dim forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of vapour; the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail.

Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre

God save this piece of Africa that is my own, delivered in travail from my body, fed from my breast, loved by my heart, because that is the nature of women.

Alan Paton -- Cry, the Beloved Country

How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and a clearness is there, maybe the result of the black reasoning.

John Steinbeck -- East of Eden

Then I account her travail but lost; for though she had brought with her Sir Launcelot, Sir Tristram, Sir Lamorak, or Sir Gawaine, I would think myself good enough for them all.

Thomas Malory -- Le Morte D’Arthur

She will have to have others, more remembering the young strong body from out whose travail even there shone something tranquil and unafraid.

William Faulkner -- Light in August

He spoke in the old-fashioned talk, and said with a full voice: "Sir, grant mercy of your great travail that ye have had this day for me and for my Queen."

T. H. White -- The Once and Future King

But not for that dream I on this strange course, But on this travail look for greater birth.

William Shakespeare -- Much Ado About Nothing

For the first time all that pure, spiritual, inward travail through which she had lived appeared on the surface.

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

All women, he thought, from the youngest on up, seemed fascinated by his travail and agony.

Pat Frank -- Alas, Babylon

On March 18 Tex Stanton, who had endured and witnessed so much travail, received his final wounds.

James Bradley -- Flags of Our Fathers

Now the landlord can wring from us his moneys and care not for the misery he evokes, for indeed it would be difficult for any man to see another starve and his wife and children as well; or to enjoy the profits born of such travail.

Kamala Markandaya -- Nectar in a Sieve

Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow….

Oscar Wilde -- The Picture of Dorian Gray

And the photographer Galen Rowell, a member of the expedition, wrote a book about the group’s travails, documenting one of the most rancorous high-altitude failures in history.

Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin -- Three Cups of Tea

Then I account her travail but lost; for though she had brought with her Sir Launcelot, Sir Tristram, Sir Lamorak, or Sir Gawaine, I would think myself good enough for them all.

Thomas Malory -- Le Morte D’Arthur, Volume I

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence.

Jack London -- The Call of the Wild

"Accept this alms, friend," continued the lady, offering a piece of gold, "in acknowledgment of thy painful travail, and of the shrines thou hast visited."

Sir Walter Scott -- Ivanhoe

He stood and I could see the travail of his spirit in how he took off his glasses and kept polishing them as if they’d never come clean.

Julia Alvarez -- In the Time of the Butterflies

They begin at my feet and rise along my body to my face, and then my dress is gone: I sit naked on the seat above the unhurrying mules, above the travail.

William Faulkner -- As I Lay Dying

The man hearkened to her words for he felt with wonder women’s woe in the travail that they have of motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a fair face for any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid.

James Joyce -- Ulysses

And when he came to the verse, "A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow because her hour is come", he missed it out.

D.H. Lawrence -- Sons and Lovers

Here’s the beginning of love at the end of our travail.

Ian McEwan -- Atonement

Her care of me in my travail, and after in my lying in, was such, that if she had been my own mother it could not have been better.

Daniel Defoe -- Moll Flanders

A blight is on our harvest in the ear, A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds, A blight on wives in travail; and withal Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague Hath swooped upon our city emptying The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm Of Pluto is full fed with groans and tears.

Sophocles -- Oedipus the King

One’s own personal doings look small indeed, when faced with the momentous travails of History, which we can only trust are for the greater good.

Margaret Atwood -- Alias Grace

God safely quit her of her burden, and With gentle travail, to the gladding of Your Highness with an heir!

William Shakespeare -- Henry VIII

So there were several days of mechanical progress over the water, the horizon sea rising to grip after a cloud like a crab after a butterfly, with armored totter, then falling and travailing.

Saul Bellow -- The Adventures of Augie March

And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

Richard Wright -- Black Boy

Though Chacko was not a card-holding member of the Party, he had been converted early and had remained, through all its travails, a committed supporter.

Arundhati Roy -- The God of Small Things

The sweat parties between the evening meal and evening study period had not changed since I was a freshman, and my classmates had proven as gifted in the arts of travail as our cadre had been.

Pat Conroy -- The Lords of Discipline

I get up every morning and see the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain, as St. Paul says, and yet there am I, trafficking in glittering splendours with wealthy women and titled libertines, and pandering to the meanest vanities—I, who have health and strength enough for anything.

Thomas Hardy -- The Return of the Native

Sir, said Launcelot, I may as well find in my heart for to forbear him at this time, for he hath had travail enough this day, and when a good knight doth so well upon some day, it is no good knight’s part to let him of his worship, and, namely, when he seeth a knight hath done so great labour; for peradventure, said Sir Launcelot, his quarrel is here this day, and peradventure he is best beloved with this lady of all that be here, for I see well he paineth himself and enforceth him to…

Mark Twain -- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

…hear at large discoursed all our fortunes:— And all that are assembled in this place, That by this sympathized one day’s error Have suffer’d wrong, go, keep us company, And we shall make full satisfaction— Twenty-five years have I but gone in travail Of you, my sons; nor till this present hour My heavy burdens are delivered:— The duke, my husband, and my children both, And you the calendars of their nativity, Go to a gossips’ feast, and go with me; After so long grief, such nativity!

William Shakespeare -- The Comedy of Errors

48:6 Fear took hold upon them there, and pain, as of a woman in travail.

The Bible -- Psalms

Come Lord, and gather of the fruits of thy travail and thy pleading.

George Eliot -- Adam Bede

Out of his travail he had climbed on stepping-stones of his dead self.

Zane Grey -- The Call of the Canyon

For Johnson and Leach the travail of existence had ceased.

Jack London -- Sea Wolf

France seems travailing in the birth of freedom [wrote William Maclay].